Notes from Inside Hospitality: OTA Giants vs. Hotel Chain Giants
In today’s hospitality economy, power no longer follows asset ownership.
It follows attention, demand origination, and digital visibility.
This comparison looks at the five largest OTA groups versus the five largest global hotel chains, using consumer traffic and booking attention as a proxy for real market influence.
The result is striking:
👉 Booking.com alone generates more global visibility than the five largest hotel chains combined.
Not one brand.
Not one region.
Five global hotel groups together.
When you aggregate Booking Holdings, Expedia Group, Airbnb, Trip.com Group and MakeMyTrip, the scale of consumer attention becomes systemic — shaping search behavior, price anchoring, and booking intent long before a hotel brand website is even considered.
Hotel chains — even at global scale — face structural constraints:
• Demand is fragmented across multiple brands and regions
• Loyalty programs activate late in the funnel
• Direct channels grow, but remain asymmetrical to platform reach
This is not a debate about OTAs versus hotels.
It is a question of who controls the top of the demand funnel.
And today, attention is the scarcest asset in travel.
That is why distribution can no longer be treated as a cost line or a tactical function.
It is a strategic control point that directly affects pricing power, margins, and long-term brand independence.
For CEOs, owners, and boards, the real question is no longer “how much do OTAs cost us?”
It is how much influence over demand we are willing to outsource.
In the next note, I’ll move from attention to hard economics — comparing revenue and EBITDA scale between OTA groups and hotel chains, where the imbalance becomes even harder to ignore.
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